Alone and empty
I moved without the moon
Attempting to keep my own rhythm
Stubbornly holding onto control.

You crept up like the tide
Always moving in and out
Too slowly to notice
Until it swept me away.

Your water nourished me
When I was accustomed to drought
Acclimated to the constant thirst
that I forgot I even had.

I dove right into the waves
Toes numb, eyes focused at the horizon
Not knowing what to expect,
Accepting your water in my soul.

Submerging myself,
My body compelled me to come up for air
Take a breath
But my gilled heart was secure down there
For the first time.

Autumn implies decay
Vibrant colors turned to brown
No green in sight
Remembering the lively spring.

But look closely as
the leaves drop from their source of life
And find the dirt from which they were born.
There is no death here.

Just as the water moves by some greater force,
As the leaves fall
to birth new life,
So do I yield to the cycle.

In allowing myself to be moved,
in forfeiting control,
In falling,
I find my peace in you

I remember your voice.
Its all I can think about, playing constantly like a record on repeat.
A broken record, with shards of past longing and foolishness
Cutting into my soul each time I listen
Each **** a fresh reminder of your absence
Scar tissue layered upon rectified hopes
A mixtape of im sorry’s and I love you’s
That I desperately long to crush
Underneath the weight of your promise
And my heavy, drunken eyes.
Every night I futilely scramble to play a new song,
Laden with silky melodies to help me drift to sleep
But instead your laugh burns in the depth of my throat
(or is that the alcohol?)
which I clutch in an attempt to strangle out
the last of your whispers
and turn it off.

after swearing you would never hurt her
you discarded her along with all the other pretty hopeless things
not broken (NEVER broken)
but anachronistic, paradoxical, incongruous
a past that won’t leave the present.

glimmering tears falling in the dark
unseen, muffled, tracing the fossils of his breath on her cheek.

a sequin dress on the living room floor
with a naked moon child sticking a head out the window
still suffocating.

eyeliner wings searching for halos
but turning up empty
knowing angels don’t exist in her world-
laughing at the thought.

when you, a ghost, moved towards the light
(even though you see a new light every day-
never her, always something, still not enough)
you left her in the blackness of your discarded dreams
like a tool you had no more use for.

ghost stories are meant to scare little girls into sleeping with guns and walking with keys interlaced between fumbling fingers
and as he fades into that ghost from her story
she will try to sleep.

disbelief in ghosts
does not stop them from haunting your dreams
nor stop you from becoming one yourself.

she’s stuck in a timeline that moved on without her
watching like a ghost as life around her naively continues (how? do they still believe?)
hand over mouth to prevent escaped screams
phone in pocket to prevent escaped words

he must not know.
admitting she is still here
is admitting she is pretty hopeless
on her own.

I tied a rope around my feet
an anchor on the other end
Tossed it overboard
And plunged behind it
into the cold Atlantic water.

Did you know that
Blue is the only color
That makes it to the vast depths
Of the oceans?

No sunny yellow days
Green fields
Pink sunsets
Red lips.

No orange.
No purple.
No gray.
Just blue.

God, why did your eyes have to be blue.

I always find myself in moments
balanced poetically between control and chaos
With just one sip tipping me over
until I’m more than tipsy
Falling, but the string is snapping
I cant bounce back
(Stumbling out the door
I need to get away
He can’t see me like this)
And as I hit the floor
A bone-crushing silence
And then my own laughter
Uncontrollable
as I’m writhing there
with my broken stilettos
and black mascara running down
my flushed face, pressed into the pavement.
Yet I still can’t stop laughing,
suddenly finding the trivialities of my own existence so ******* funny.
My sanity is outweighed by the bottles
like rocks on the scale
Rising up in patient stillness
Until I fall, and fail.
He wouldn’t want to catch me
So I catch my breath and stand,
My ripped clothes now revealing dried, caked-on blood
(It matches the lipstick stain, still on my glass)
wounds of doubt and delirious self-indulgence.
Now everyone sees it,
knows my self-inflicted secret,
that I wanted myself to fall-
I’ve grown bored of this balancing act.
I pull my coat a little tighter
So he won’t notice that I ripped myself open
With the drinks he bought me,
and walk back into the bar,
because if I went to sleep now
the loneliness would crush me.
and worst of all,
I might miss the way his voice sparkles
At 4 am.

I put the flowers you sent me
On my desk
They clung to life on
A glass of water
And the light that passed
Through the slits of my blinds.

They were quite lovely
You know.
Vibrant, resilient
Arching towards any hope of sun
That reached my 17th story apartment.

They’re dead now
Starting to brown, shrivel up.
Fitting.
I can’t seem to throw them away.

desperately, i try to claw through my chest
with dull, filed-down nails in an attempt
to break apart these stitches in time
that are holding me together, barely,
with a single thread;
i laugh as if mocking my own futile battle against my past
with knowledge of what my present stacks
in tightly wrapped boxes hidden under my own bed,
guarded by a monster
with four hands and four legs and four arms and two hearts,
because i left myself entwined in him that night
and never bothered to ask for mine back.

so i write this letter to him knowing
it will go unread because his eyes have grown
accustomed to the darkness under there
and the only light i’ve ever seen came from his smile
and he hasn't smiled at me in 3 weeks, 2 days, and 1 minute
but who's counting up,
i only count down until this year ends
and i can put up a new calendar with new dates
that wont be ruined by his
discontented restlessness and absent mind.
i can fill it with plans and hope,
my life squeezed into inch-wide boxes.

but nothing that i do will make the slightest difference,
like subtracting my 20 years from infinity and
dividing my pain into months and days and seconds,
dividing until i press it into a slide and it is
invisible even under a microscope,
because it doesn’t matter
and he doesn’t matter
and i don’t matter
and nothing matters
and nothing ever will. not here,
in this vortex of voided passion and wasted time.

i have no more love to give, he has it all.
nor can i take any-
i lack the space.
my muscles are filled with agony,
my lungs with salt water,
my bones with frailty
and my tongue with the bitter sting of goodbye.

if i were gone no one would even notice.
maybe he would cry
but later he would forget. in milliseconds
i would be reduced from infinite heartache to nothing
and then maybe i could forget like everyone else,
my own well-deserved plunge into happiness.